Recently Received (video edition)

new poem – Orpheus 1.3.2011

there are factions devoted to you

and your looking back, your unwillingness

shattering the split seconds

where you watched your only want

wane back and disappear

as ghost among ghosts

as a memory

that takes the time slowly

fading to the recesses

and though you remake it

it is not new or whole

but a replica of a replica

shedding itself uncontrollably

*****Spicer talks a lot about the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, and countless others have written/discussed it, but I figured why not

Ted Berrigan

“Whatever is going to happen is already happening”

So I’ve given up (at least for the time being)

No one doubts that writing poems is hard. At least, people that try and write a “good” poem and continuously fail. I have been trying for quite some time now (years) and have little to show in terms of creation. I have poems, but I know what is wrong with them, and they are not worth attempting to fix.

My main problem results from: I want to go back to writing without thinking about it so much, just write from impulse. However, I was writing like that when I was 17, in a hugely imitative Ginsberg/Whitman phase (yes, I even used the “O” in my poems). So in a way I don’t want it back. I blame school for taking that away from me. I learned how to think about writing in a different way, and I can’t say that it’s the best way because I’ve constantly faltered creatively because of it. Intellectually though, I know I have spread out my area of reading (though I still have found 20th Century American Poetry pre-1980, not just The Beats, to be my favorite). So schooling was a double-edged sword for me. But what is most important, is getting back to that early ideology behind creation while bringing along the things that I have learned throughout the years.

The Spicer lectures jarred me in a manner that I didn’t expect. Spicer’s metaphor of radio for poetic composition really got me thinking about where poems come from. Spicer argues that they come from the “Outside”, from what he antagonistically dubs “Martians”, and the poet is merely a receptor of these signals and attempts to interpret them as best as humanly possible. I’ve always liked to think that poems come from me, and even if i’m on some kind of automatic writing, it’s still me. However the fact that I am not in control is an appealing idea. One that might fit well into Spicer’s model, and more importantly, with my recent confusion.

And this is where I get to thinking about it too much.

And this is where I tell you that I am taking a break from writing poems. Though, what I might do is try to write fragments of things I’m telling myself not-to-do or what I shouldn’t do. Of course this still is a bit too mental for me, and yet again, therein lies the problem.

Another problem that comes in is that I can’t actually stop writing poems. Spicer says in one of his lectures that a person that wants to become a junky or a poet is a fool. The implications of this statement are far-reaching. Poems are addicting. Withdrawl from poems for too long makes me irritable. Poems are junk. I don’t think I’ll ever completely stop writing them because it’s what I’ve chosen to do, or maybe they chose me.

I think the best thing for poets to do, especially those going or graduating from school, is to not think about it so much, train yourself not to think about it. This is advice that comes  from Spicer rather than myself, but in this context it applies tenfold.

The House that Jack Built – Jack Spicer’s Lectures

So I picked up The House that Jack Built, which is a collection of lectures from Jack Spicer on poetics…I also picked up Kennenth Rexroth’s Selected Poems.

Really though, The House that Jack Built is a great companion to Spicer’s Collected Poems (My Vocabulary Did this to Me). In the series of lectures Spicer elaborates on his poetics allowing the readers of his work to have an easier time deciphering his poems. Not having The House in conjunction to the Collected Poems is like having a map of a city that doesn’t exist.  So check it out.

William Carlos Williams – Paterson review

William Carlos Williams. Paterson, Books I-IV.
New Directions, 1992. 311p.

I’d probably recommend Paterson as the first or second Modernist projects to read (next to H.D.’s Trilogy and Williams’ Kora in Hell or Spring and All).

I chose to read the first four books even though there are a Book V and VI (Williams did not finish the sixth). The reason I did not incorporate the final two books is because Williams initially sees the first four as his project, and that this project was completed more or less by one version of him while Book V and VI were produced by a slightly-older, different version. (I will be discussing Books V and VI on their own to see if they fit in with the project or if Williams was right in separating them as extensions or expansions of the completed project.).
Williams’ own introduction attempts to establish the structure of the poem, incorporating ideas that mirror Socrates’ notion of “isomorphism” from Plato’s Republic. According to his short introduction the poem also takes its form from the Passaic Falls: “the river above the falls”,”the catastrophe of the Falls itself”, “the river below the Falls”, and the entrance at the end into the great sea” (xiii, 1951). For Williams, Paterson is a man but also a city, this line is blurred vaguely at points throughout the first four books; though it is hard to make out the man, Williams does an excellent job of showing us the layers of the city.
Williams’ intro also expresses concern with the general substance of his epic. “The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking and in my search, as I looked about, became to struggle to interpret and use this language. This is the substance of the poem. But the poem is also the search of the poet for his language, his own language which I, quite apart from the material theme had to use to write at all. I had to write in a certain way to gain a verisimilitude with the object I had in mind” (xiv). The great thing about Williams’ work, and Paterson, is his definition and execution of verisimilitude is much different than what we might encounter with say, a contemporary straight-forward narrative poet.

Clearly this is a large and ambitious project, and Williams’ hasn’t ruined his project with his short introduction, more or less he’s provided a foundation: Content/Material: Passaic Falls, history, biography, Concept: Comparison between Man and City, their similarities as agents, abstract ideas, and general existence, and Substance: Language, grounded in the material, also the poet coming to terms or locating his language. An interesting aspect about language arises through Williams’ conflict: That a poet can be old and well known and still not feel certain about his or language.  How Williams manages to interrelate and occasionally break apart these concepts is the main tension and engaging aspect of the work. This all sounds very dense, but the language of Paterson is direct and easily understood, much like the Williams we are used to.

However, even though this looks and sounds like Williams we know and love, this is an older, and in many ways, just as daring-as-he-is-old poet. Williams doesn’t seem to have slowed down, and he has even begun to push his subject matter even more. Paterson contains a large amount of subject material and most of it is pulled from just about every angle, from philosophy to history to biography to human relationships to sex to war…etc.

Ex: “they sought safety (in books)/ but ended battering against glass/ at the high windows/ The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own/ of stagnation and death       . / Beautiful Thing! / –the cost of dreams’ in which we search, after a surgery/ of the wits and must translate”. Williams’ shows us the torment and hopelessness of Paterson while also adding another layer of interpretation to the prose sections dispersed within the text.

Williams makes great use of folklore and supposed historical events of Paterson (regardless of truth value, the historically based prose sections add depth to the poems and vice versa). It’s important to follow this device of hybrid through Paterson, since it becomes a way to see how these sections shift and add depth to each book differently; as the books change with the form of the Falls so does their content. This might be a painstakingly obvious observation, but how Williams’ accomplishes this is through the same technique we’ve seen in Spring and All, where both the prose and poetry explain or enhance the meaning of the other. An interesting story appears in Book I Part I about “Sam Patch”, a man who throws himself off high places into bodies of water and has a pet bear. This hearkens the kind of emotive response we might get from reading a Paul Bunyan folk tale, but Williams again deepens what seems so straight forward and obvious. This technique demonstrates what poetic experience has taught Williams: descriptions of the obvious in a new way can transcend simple line and word juxtapositions, in turn becoming very useful for sustaining and allowing subject matter to be malleable.  This also allows the reader to not be as strict towards Williams’ goals for Paterson. One could argue, through Book I-IV, Williams’ has failed in not only showing Paterson the man, but also in clearly articulating his metaphorical/personified outset between the man and the city. Clarity being one of Williams’ greatest assets as a poet, it’s ironic that he doesn’t completely pull through. However, the language and structure of the poem definitely are interesting enough to sustain interest. The diction, repeating images, and prose sections are enough of a reason to read and re-read Paterson.

Of course, Paterson gives me the impression that I missed a lot on the first read through. There is definitely an aesthetic return value but also a demand the reader returns and studies the poem in order to grasp the deeper elements. Paterson is a quicker read but is just as deep and complex without sacrificing accessibility or intellect; it is also charming and exuberant, in the way Williams always has been. At the same time though, this is a different kind of chance-taking Williams, but one definitely worth reading. I will definitely pick this up again.